The Canal and Rivers Trust (CRT) is on a mission to make the lives of liveaboards with no homes moorings harder.

They have been meeting with boaters’ groups to try to get an agreement to a defined place and minimum distance that continuous cruisers must travel to comply with the guidance. This – with the lack of mooring rings and facilities – puts us on a path towards the destruction of our way of life. We must stop the CRT in making our lives harder. We need more mooring rings, more facilities and no more increase of mooring restrictions.

The National Bargee Travellers Association London is hosting a public meeting about the attacks on boater dwellers and discussion about what we should do about it. We have also invited some speakers from the wider housing movement so we can get ideas about what can be done to defend our homes.

To many of us in the NBTA, it has become increasingly clear that the issues that we face as boaters are far from unique. The more we see of the problems facing people living on land, be they council tenants, private tenants or owner-occupiers, the more we realise how much we have in common.

Because of the common threats we face, we have become affiliated to the Radical Housing Network. This group brings together a wide range of groups campaigning to protect the right to be housed, as well as people exploring the possibilities of co-operative housing development and other alternative models.

We have seen the same issues time and time again, and these are issues that affect boaters too. The rapid development of luxury waterside apartments across London is accompanied by the creation of permanent moorings that reduce the space for continuous cruisers, who are forced to move further afield. This mirrors the regeneration happening on land, resulting in 45,000 families being moved out of their borough in the past five years.

We believe that our position is stronger if we can call upon the solidarity of all those groups engaged in similar campaigns to defend their rights and their homes. In the coming weeks and months, we will be posting articles here exploring the background to the challenges we all face, whether living on the land or on the water.